The present invention relates generally to an online used-car dealing technology, and more particularly to an online system effective in an inter-dealer transaction.
A used-car dealer, when receiving an inquiry about a used car from a general customer and if a dealer's stock does not have the car meeting requirements of the customer, searches the car desired by the customer with reference to a used-car database structured through a network in linkage with the used-car dealers.
This type of used-car dealing on the network involves a difficulty for a prospective buyer (dealer) to grasp an actual quality of the used car. Therefore, the prospective buyer is unable to determine the purchase only from a photo obtained from the database and assessment information given by a sales member.
Further, in the case of outputting information for specifying a car by use of character information and static image data, an actual condition of the car is hard to grasp. Especially, an expression of how a real coating surface is in the form of a static image with a fidelity requires a high-level photographing technology such as enhancing an image resolution. It is in fact difficult in terms of a communication load and a photographing cost to use the image described above. Therefore, a used-car dealing system on the network is operated, wherein an image obtained by photographing the whole of the used car from a forward oblique angle. What can be grasped from this kind of image is just that a name of car, a name of model and a color expressed by character information are correct or that the car has no damage by collision.
Accordingly, the prospective buyer searches the used cars from the database and, after finding out the desired car, asks an inspector to check the car by telephone or FAX etc. Then, a procedure taken is that a sales price other dealing conditions are finally determined based on a result of the inspection, and a negotiation with the general customer is started.
Therefore, it takes at least 2˜3 days until the purchase is determined since the desired car was searched and found out.